Chapter 5 - THE MAN WHO CALLED HIMSELF DAVID
I had loved David for fourteen months.
That was the fact I kept returning to as Miriam placed the two photographs on her desk. In one, David wore a denim jacket and smiled against the Brooklyn waterfront, his arm around me on the afternoon he promised we'd get an apartment together. In the other, a man with the same sloping eyebrows and crooked nose stood near Sofia Valenti's car sixteen years earlier.
The resemblance was obvious. The age wasn't.
“He'd have been a child,” I said. “Or maybe a teenager. This man looks thirty.”
“Could be his father,” Miriam suggested.
Matteo sat beside the window, his jaw tight. “Or the same person with an altered identity. Some of the dates in the old records were deliberately changed.”
I shook my head. “No. I know his face. The man in the photograph has a scar above his left eyebrow. David had that scar. He told me it happened when he was twenty-two, falling off a motorcycle.”
The forensic analyst had already warned us that low-quality photographic comparisons were not reliable proof of identity. I understood. I still couldn't ignore what I saw.
“I met him at a laundromat,” I said. “He helped carry my basket when my shoulder was sore. He remembered what coffee I liked. He used to leave notes on my pillow.”
My voice cracked on the last word. I hated that the memories could still hurt. He had also borrowed money for rent, stolen the emergency fund Agnes left me, and vanished with my grandmother's ring. He'd told me he was ashamed of his debts. I'd believed that. I had spent months blaming myself for missing signs of addiction and dishonesty.
“Did he ever ask about your grandmother?” Matteo asked.
“Constantly. He wanted to know where she stored her papers, whether she'd left a will, whether I had relatives. I thought he was interested in my life.”
Miriam made a note. “Did he ever mention a blue envelope?”
I felt sick. “Once. We were cleaning the apartment after Agnes died, and he said old people hid important things in books. He asked whether I wanted him to sort the Bible and photographs. I said no.”
Matteo leaned forward. “Did he have access to your studio?”
“He had a key. Before he left.”
We understood the implication at the same moment. Someone had been trying to find the envelope long before I encountered Leo. Someone had entered my life under a false story and walked away with my savings when I stopped being useful.
Miriam called the detective handling the apartment intrusion. She shared the photographs and requested a lawful review of David's identity, employment records, and known associates. Matteo offered to send his own people after him. She refused.
“Not without coordinating with police,” she said. “A private chase gives this man an excuse to disappear or claim intimidation. We want admissible evidence.”
To my surprise, Matteo agreed.
That afternoon I went to a hospital follow-up. My shoulder was healing, but the physician warned me against returning to physical work too soon. I would need rehabilitation and had to watch for signs of infection. I stared at the printed instructions while calculating missed shifts.
Miriam told me the workplace insurance claim was being investigated, but no payment had yet arrived. Matteo offered an advance from a victim assistance fund overseen by a nonprofit he supported. I insisted on written terms and independent approval. He nodded and handed me the form without trying to persuade me.
There was something unsettling about being offered help without a hidden price. Agnes had taught me that dignity meant paying my own way. The trouble was that I had spent years paying for things that were never mine to carry.
When I returned to the apartment building, Leo was waiting near the elevator with Captain Rex tucked under his arm. He had made a cardboard medal with purple glitter.
“It's for protecting people,” he announced.
I smiled. “Is that an official dinosaur medal?”
“Yes. But it's not for fighting. Rosa says heroes call for help and make sure everybody is okay.”
“Rosa's right.”
He tied the ribbon around my uninjured wrist. It was too tight, and he immediately loosened it when I told him.
“Does your shoulder still hurt?”
“Less than yesterday.”
He considered that. “When I was scared after Mama died, Papa said I could tell him even when the scary thing wasn't happening anymore.”
“That sounds like a good rule.”
Leo looked toward the elevator doors. “Papa gets scared too. He doesn't say so, but he looks at the window when I'm asleep.”
I crouched carefully. “Grown-ups get scared, Leo. It doesn't mean they can't keep you safe.”
He nodded, satisfied, and ran to show Rosa his drawing.
Later that evening, I found Matteo in the kitchen staring at a photograph of Alessia. Her smile was bright, almost mischievous; she held infant Leo in a yellow blanket, with one arm thrown around Matteo's shoulders.
“Your son thinks you look out the window when you're scared,” I said.
Matteo gave a tired half-smile. “My son notices too much.”
“Better than not enough.”
He turned the photograph face down, then immediately turned it upright again. “Alessia told me she was receiving threats. I thought it was because of our family name. I increased security. I never asked what she'd found.”
“You loved her.”
“I did. I wasn't good at listening.”
I sat opposite him. “I loved David. Or the person he pretended to be. I don't know how to reconcile that with what we're learning.”
“You don't have to tonight.”
His patience made me more vulnerable than his money ever could. I wanted to tell him that the night at Lumina had changed something inside me. I also wanted to avoid becoming another woman whose life was rearranged by the decisions of a De Luca.
Instead, I asked about Sofia's work. He told me Carlo had helped establish a public employee pension fund associated with the harbor redevelopment project. Sofia had discovered that its assets were being diverted into shell companies controlled by a consortium of investors. The trust's charter included a remarkable provision: control of a particular audit archive and recovery account would pass to Sofia's legitimate descendants if she disappeared before the investigation was completed.
“You mean me.”
“Possibly. We need legal confirmation.”
“Why would anyone write that into a financial agreement?”
“Because Sofia didn't trust the people who controlled the company. She used a family trust to create a path for her evidence to survive her.”
“And Vittorio wanted the documents.”
“He wanted the money and the right to destroy the audit.”
I asked Matteo something else before the evening ended. “What if you find out your father did worse things than you know? Will you still help expose them?”
He looked at Carlo's photograph on the wall. “I don't know how much I can forgive. But I know that hiding a crime because of the surname would make me part of it.”
“That's not the same as an answer.”
“It's the honest one I have.”
I accepted it. He was grieving Alessia and confronting the possibility that his father had helped create the machinery that ruined my life. I was confronting the possibility that the man I'd kissed at a laundromat had been assigned to get close to me. Neither of us had reason to trust our own judgment.
Still, when I stood to leave, Matteo walked beside me to the corridor and stopped before touching my uninjured arm. “May I?” he asked.
I let him steady the sleeve of my coat. The gesture was small. I noticed that he'd begun asking before helping, rather than assuming gratitude meant consent.
“You don't have to rescue me,” I told him.
“I know.”
“I'm serious.”
“So am I.”
He returned to the kitchen while I stood in the hall with my coat half on, wondering when a man who frightened an entire city had begun trying to learn how not to frighten me.
I knew attraction could be dangerous when it felt like salvation. I promised myself I would keep my own lawyer, my own choices, and a life outside his walls. If he ever wanted to be part of that life, he would have to meet me in it.
The doorbell rang. Evelyn entered with the detective, whose expression was grim.
“We identified David's legal father,” she said. “His name was Stefan Rusk. He's dead. The man you knew as David Rusk used another identity before he met you.”
She slid a photograph across the table. It showed David outside a police station with a woman I recognized from the news: Claudia Serrano, a corporate attorney who represented Vittorio's investment group.
“Claudia paid his rent,” the detective said. “And his phone records show he contacted her the evening your grandmother died.”
I stared at the two faces. “Where is he now?”
“We have a lead, but we haven't located him.”
Then she added something that seemed to erase the floor beneath me.
“Your grandmother's death certificate was signed by a doctor who also worked at the private clinic treating Sofia Valenti after the Brooklyn fire.”
May you like
I had believed Agnes died of natural causes.
For the first time, I wondered whether the person who raised me had been allowed to die in peace.
